Reimagining the New Woman: Socio-Cultural Models of Female Agency and Moral Selfhood in Contemporary Odia Writings

Abstract

Literary narratives have been a major influence on the construction of socio-culturally shared conceptions of gender, morality and personhood. The concept of ‘New Woman’, emerging during colonial modernity, has typically been analysed within literary and feminist historiography as a socio-cultural and ideological construct. In this study, the ‘New Woman’ is reimagined as a socio-culturally induced psychological construct of selfhood by looking at the writings of Odia women, which are used to narrate and analyse moral agency, emotional life and relational identity. Based on cultural psychology and feminist and postcolonial theory, this study examines the works of Binapani Mohanty, Pratibha Ray and Susmita Bagchi to identify ways, in which female agency is envisioned in vernacular landscape. The domestic realism of Mohanty carries forward the moral endurance and reflective agency. Similarly, reimagining of myth by Ray gives them a narrative authority and an ethical voice, while the contemporary fiction of Bagchi shows the psychological ambiguity of aspiration in late-modern social situations. The article examines how literary narratives act as cultural models of personhood, highlighting incorporation of local narratives of autonomy, obligation and identity formation from Odia context. The study suggests that regional (Odia) literary traditions are not just foundational for feminist literary scholarships, but for cultural psychology, supplementing non-western constructions of agency and moral selfhood.